Super developed and connected Korea is perhaps not a great model to compare to when discussing mobile broadband in Latin America, but that’s just what Samsung decided to do during its presentation at the Informa LTE Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil this week.
Taking to the stage to present on “future engaged solutions,” Samsung’s Ip Hong, VP & Head of the firm’s marketing group for its telecom systems business trotted out the same old much heard mantras about mobile data traffic “explosions” and “tsunamis”, increasing from anywhere between 26-55x.
With the growing popularity of smart devices in LatAm, said Hong it was thus inevitable that the region would also experience huge data traffic growth.
Then, using tactics of shock and awe on a room of terrified looking LatAm mobile operators, Hong took Korea as an example and noted that recent studies had shown the average Korean user chomps through 271MB per month each and is seeing a very rapid increase.
Smartphones currently have 19% penetration in Korea, representing 10 million out of the 51 million population.
Even more worrying, said Hong was that only a small number of users is consuming the highest level of traffic, with 10% of users using a whopping 93% of the 3G.
Korean operator KT has apparently been doing its best to offload as much of this data as it can onto Wi-Fi/Femto or WiMAX solutions, while looking towards LTE as a longer term fix.
The operator is also expanding its backhaul, upgrading to HSPA+ and implementing usage based tariffs to try and keep the data flood under control.
Another useful tactic, said Hong was to note how data traffic volume varies, even in a small area, by time of day and location.
Then of course, Samsung is also touting its own “heterogeneous network solutions,” and “Smart LTE solutions” which it believes will decrease capex/opex by reducing the required number of eNBs, support easy installation, optimize deployment and automatic adjustments and improve network performance in capacity as well as coverage. No small boast.
Keeping with the ‘smart’ theme, Hong also promoted Samsung’s Smartcluster (including the Samsung scheduler), the smartcell, and the smartcloud. Not to mention the operator and user friendly smartphone platform.
Tomorrow’s world, said Hong is all about clouding and converging, not to mention future proofing, and Samsung says it is “fully engaged in the mobile market” and able to work with anything from CDMA, WCDMA, LTE and even WiMAX.
The Korean company has already demonstrated 100+ Mbps mobile broadband technology in its labs, which it says could be suitable for both LTE and 802.16m development paths.
With seven commercial contracts already under its belt (six for LTE-FDD and one for TD-LTE), plus another 30+ trial contracts, it certainly seems Samsung has already carved a niche out for itself.
